


The Obvious Child

by jackmarlowe



Series: Somebody's Sins [4]
Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: Drug Use, F/M, Gen, Mafia Family Politics, Past Sexual Assault, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Siblings, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:48:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6738748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael Corleone's Nevada expansion and seemingly inevitable coming-of-age as his father's son may only be jeopardised by his family, and an FBI agent who knew him before he was a man at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a trans character keeping as closely as possible to the context of this story and family. In the process, I’ve stretched some historical possibilities (e.g. this is a world where a trans man can join the 1940s US military post-transition) discarded a few pieces of canon (Michael and Kay don’t yet have children), and tried to create a believable set of circumstances for an out transmasculine character in a deeply patriarchal, misogynist culture with some very specific gender roles. Disclaimer that I’m trans, but no two people are that in the same way; Michael’s attitudes toward masculinity and being trans (including the language I've used in the summary) are meant to match his historical reality and don’t reflect my own.
> 
> This story involves transphobic attitudes and language, sometimes-crude references to medical transition available at the time, and a lot of internalised homo/transphobia and misogyny. I’ve seen this as an exercise in exploring historical transness without imposing a modern trans narrative – even if this particular situation is less likely – but I’m not going to be gratuitous about some of the uglier aspects of that. There aren’t a whole lot of fictional 1950s trans narratives out there to go on, so I’d really welcome feedback about the choices I’ve made, especially from other trans people.
> 
> This story begins in 1955, a week after the end of the first film. The title's taken from a very un-Mafia Paul Simon song.

_I'm accustomed to a smooth ride_  
_Or maybe I'm a dog who's lost its bite_  
_I don't expect to be treated like a fool no more_  
_I don't expect to sleep through the night_  
_Some people say a lie's a lie's a lie_  
_But I say why:_  
_Why deny the obvious child?_

 

The dream is a memory they share, though they remember it differently.

It rips Michael awake so violent he shouts with the force of it; Kay’s eyes open to his hands moth-jarred and abrupt in the space above their bed, palms out as if to take a knife. Her feet jerk up by instinct and she opens her mouth for a scream, but she only finds a shaky exhale that comes out as the smallest noise, a kind of startled cough.

His arm against her ribcage, his feet kicking out against the comforter, and she abruptly feels the heat of the dream like a separate conscious presence.

‘Michael-’

He’s blinking damp-spiked black hair out of his eyes; in the half-shade moonlight cracked through the curtains, she can see him coming up. Still practically asleep herself, Kay rolls to her knees in her nightgown and slides careful hands up to his hips as she used to do a few times a month after the war, almost reliably so after he’d had more than two drinks or on the Fourth of July. She swallows her sleep-mouth and takes a real breath.

‘Michael. Michael - wake up. You’re here - darling. You’re here. Wake up. You’re home in bed.’

His hands come up again, gentler and trembling; she takes them firmly and murmurs quiet nothings of approval.

He hasn’t done this in some time. Kay’s instincts come from a conversation, terse and nearly lost in translation, she had with the baker’s daughter Katerina a year after Michael told his family about her: she remembers her line every time they wake up like this. Does your husband have bad dreams? Kay’d asked timidly about Enzo, the handsome fresh-off-the-boat Italian soldier made sinless and American, she understood later, by the incontrovertible blessedness of Michael’s family name. Katerina gave her a dark unreadable look with all the shrewdness of the circle to which neither she nor Kay was entirely privy. He sleeps with the war in his stomach, she said. Sometimes it gives him indigestion. It’s not something he can control.

Michael is drenched in sweat and already impatient, clenching his jaw to try and stop his teeth from chattering. He pushes at his eyes with one hand and tugs at his sticking undershirt with the other, shifting his weight with a wordless grumble. There’s a trace of his old embarrassment she hasn’t seen since he was much younger – it really has been a while.

‘Tell me about it?’ she asks gently, keeping one hand pressed mindful against his hip as she settles back beside him.

She’s so used to him shaking his head – maybe the name of the place, or a word that’ll reference the longer story he’s told her just the once – that it catches her a little off guard when he hesitates.

The dream is a memory, so whole and sudden Kay feels the back of her throat catch the nausea that’s turning him pale:

When he had a different name and they took the bus from Hanover to Buffalo at the end of every month, the cops got them both for the first time. Kay had been picked up once before but, Michael explains quiet, his eyes narrowing and searching for words along the lines of the blankets bunched between them, he didn’t know that at the time. Hadn’t realised. He understood the consequences of himself, to the degree he could back then, but hadn’t thought how this might extend to girls like her. They’d still been very new. Kay remembers: the way a smile would start tugging at the corners of his lips minutes before he’d ask her to dance.

They were always in separate cells. Probably they still do it this way.

Bashed the bars with billy clubs, rang in the early morning from midnight with a clatter that felt like the cell block walls were howling for the people they enclosed, who heard or felt their own howls rising helpless with the dread that came with each passing half hour. Sometimes they took someone out and the ones left behind would try to bounce prayers around corners and corners where they couldn’t see, or sometimes could.

‘I thought about calling my father,’ Michael says, and touches her hand. ‘Do you remember?’

No. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t thinking – about him, she knows, but doesn’t say.

He doesn’t say what they did to him, but in the near-dark Kay can see it flicker across his narrow distracted face.

‘I just kept thinking about you,’ he says. He repeats himself. He can’t quite look at her; his gaze has gone distant over her shoulder, frowning and exhausted. ‘I got their badge numbers, but I kept thinking about you. What they might do. I guess I thought, if they treated me like that-’ His laugh rasps too loud in their still room. ‘But they didn’t even know who I was. Stupid.’

What happened in the dream, she wants to know? But it’s just that – his own memory come back violent and vivid, or as he sees it a memory that belongs to who he was. They differ somewhat in their interpretations of where that person begins and ends their relation with the man whose shoulders tremble a little still in bed beside her. He hisses out a long breath and closes his mouth without asking for what or if she remembers.

Easier to close the door, Kay thinks as she covers them both with the blanket again and Michael slides against her, his hand on her stomach and his knee fitting against the back of hers. The recollection has somehow become his in the telling, with the addition of his father’s implied presence: the distance from her own memory feels safe and cold again.

This is easier, letting Michael call it his business and fold it away in a drawer. Easy, to maintain a constant as what he calls his business changes within the space of a week. The past is his to remember for the reason Kay knows his father gave him: it’s over this, the Don said just before he died, he will always have the least control.

* * *

He may be a goddamn bastard and she will never forgive him for what he’s done, but her brother can cook in a way he couldn’t before Sicily. She allows him that, as she does even the men she hates.

Connie’s not one to keep quiet at the dinner table. Today she lets it happen around her, dishes and shouts swinging past her head, silverware passed by three pairs of hands, summer pressed steam staining her blouse and lifting her curls as she rises past the kids to get the cups. Michael stands even-footed at the stove in his rolled-up white shirtsleeves, head bent over the sauce as he listens to Peter talk and talk; her hip brushes his as she stands on tiptoe to reach the salt. Connie can feel his attention shift and jerks her chin irritable at Peter instead.

‘Hey, gimme the pepper!’

It’s beside Michael’s left hand, but Peter, leaning wet-faced against the counter with his buttons undone against the muggy July heat, glances up without pausing and passes it across the stove.

‘-‘cause we ain’t got a lotta time on our hands this month, you know, and honestly, Mikey, I ain’t got a lot of time for cops right now, eh? And you know what that son of a bitch says to me? He tells me, okay, but we’re gonna have to roll over and play-’

The sauce goes on the table; Mama raps Victor’s dirty knuckles with a wooden spoon and the kids dive for their turn at the sink; Michael opens a bottle of wine and the men passing through wait their turn for the bowls after grace.

Tom passes her the spaghetti, just as quiet as Connie is today, though it sits more natural on him than it’s ever done her. She’s already noticed how he and Rocco move around her, now – more polite than family, leaning back further than her wedding day. The least they can fucking do. Kay, sitting beside Mama, hasn’t spoken to her in a week. She keeps her eyes fucking demure on the sauce as it passes from her hands to Mama’s, Mama’s to Tom’s, Tom’s to Connie’s. The usual din clatters up and the ugly hot sear through her stomach that comes as she takes the bowl ebbs, brief: let it be.

‘-said I’d call Johnny in the morning.’

‘You can call him after dinner,’ Michael says calmly, taking a slice of cheese for his pasta.

‘I just tried the casino, said he ain’t off the plane yet. Tommy, you know what time he’s getting-?’

‘It’s delayed.’ Tom stretches out easy and takes the bread from her niece across the table. ‘Nothing to worry about. All the summer tourists heading out that way – I hear it’s cooler out in LA than here today.’

She sees Michael nod in the corner of her vision, and the lesser soldiers seated at the table today duck their heads as if in parody, quick, to close the matter. When Sonny went out the door and didn’t come back business at the table did the same, smooth as when they were babies and fewer men shared the stove.

They’re going to Vegas, is what she knows, from this and other small quick-muffled conversations she’s ducked upon in the hall. Johnny Fontane is helping negotiate some entertainment deal in one of the casinos Michael wants to pick up, and then some. Gambling’s been their business for a while but she understands that this is different, that the kinds of negotiations needed for these deals won’t be happening in Pop’s old office. She ain’t stupid, and Michael has already started to make it clear what kind of operation he’s running.

He’ll be good at it, she supposes, and sets her teeth. She’d be damn good at it too, in a world where she ended up looking just like her youngest brother.

Mama pronounces the meal excellent and there’s a loud chorus of approval for Michael’s cooking. Victor looks at Connie imploringly over the table, his tiny face and fists and his cousins on either side evenly stained with sauce.

'Are we going to the beach now, Ma?'

She realises abruptly she hasn't said a word all meal. 'Huh?'

'Uncle Michael said we're gonna go to the beach!'

A clamour of agreement from the kids. Connie looks helpless and furious down the table to her brother, feeling her hands clench into fists beneath the checked tablecloth. She hates how calm he is, raising his eyes to look back as he wipes his hands with a napkin; how he can speak to her son and promise him something independent of her raging resolution to take him and the baby away; how she is allowed, by his grace, to sit here on the condition last week's outburst never happen again. A week in their family's life is considered enough time to grieve. Mama still wears black for Pop but, like a ferociously good Corleone woman, she says nothing at all.

Connie knows she should go and here she fucking is, helpless as her mother, as fucking Kay and her New England everything. She opens her mouth and can't say anything, Victor watching her with round hopeful brown eyes.

Michael taps the table with his knuckles and crosses his legs. 'Is that okay, Con? Peter said he'd take the kids.'

'I don't want _Peter_ -' Not that it's Peter, who changed her diapers, but that he's sitting at her brother's right hand watching her with shrewd dog's eyes and knowing. She fumbles for words and ignores Mama's pursed lips.

'I'll take them,' Tom offers suddenly from her other side. 'My day's free if Johnny's delayed-' He raises his eyebrows at Michael and gets a nod. 'You wanna go cool off, kids? I want some ice cream.'

This raises the usual screams. Connie gets up, washes her plate, and goes to look in on the baby upstairs, her heart roaring in her chest.

When he was born, everyone said Michael Rizzi looked like his father; they've already started the switch to his godfather and namesake. Connie's never believed in these comparisons – it's a fucking baby, after all, and looks exactly like his brother did at that age, bunched-up and pink with a snub nose – but she looks for Carlo all the same as she lifts baby Mike from his crib and adjusts him whimpering sleepy on her shoulder. Her kids sleep in her old room when they're in this house; she turns to the gilded full-length mirror she got for her sixteenth birthday and examines the pair of them. Her hair has come out of this morning's shape and spills over Mike's matching black wisps, his mouth half-open in a yawn against her shoulder, and she has to blink at the stark set of her mascara against her dark eyes. Michael looked tired too, she supposes, like he didn't sleep last night. Good.

She pats Mike absently on the back, though he hasn't been fed yet this afternoon. It'll be weird if he does turn out looking like his father. Part of her hopes he does, to remind Michael of what he's done well into his godson's adulthood and coming of age perhaps as the ironic inheritor to everything Michael builds for himself, with him unlikely to come up with his own kids as far as Connie can tell despite him occasionally mentioning something to the contrary. Part of her doesn't give a single shit.

A week has given her enough time to understand it was the principle of the thing, above all, rather than the death itself. Carlo was her business. She'd had plans, or at least she'd thought she had.

Footsteps on the stairs; she swings around tense and ready to snap, but it's only Mama, solemn and quiet in the door as she watches her daughter and grandson. Connie hefts Mike on her shoulder and shifts her weight to her other leg, feeling the sweat on the soles of her bare feet stick to the tacky wood varnish floor.

' _Cosa c'è?_ '

'He's just waking up.'

Her mother gestures curtly; Connie hands her son over and wraps her arms around herself in the space he leaves.

'You were rude to your brother,' Mama observes, rocking gently as Mike's protests take on a little more conscious indignation.

Connie stares with eyes narrowed. 'I don't care.'

'You should.' Mama shakes her head once, sharp, at the giddy furious way Connie straightens up even in this oppressive heat; she juts her chin over the baby's shoulder as if to keep him from the conversation. 'No, I told you – you don't be stupid right now.'

This was the closest thing they'd had to a full and honest conversation about what their family does, last week – better late than never, Connie thinks bitterly. Mama had held her so tight and shook her so roughly she left bruises, as she cried and cried and then fought against the grip. You understand? she repeated again and again. You understand now?

She shrugs now and says nothing. Mama studies her in the quick, peculiar way she has only with her children and grandchildren, her ringed hand finding the small of the baby's back and holding him still for a moment.

'Don't be stupid,' she continues, careful, 'so you start thinking you're helpless. You ain't that.'

'I _fuckin_ ’ feel it, Ma.'

'Yeah, yeah. But you got some options, now.'

'Like you did with Pop, huh? Michael can't- _' Can't take my son, can't kill my husband, can't make me do a goddamn thing, can't touch me_. He can, he can, he will. Michael, small and delicate-boned still, once mistaken for her twin, now treats his part inherited, part chemical-made access to violence with a bone-deep easiness that is both familiar and terrifyingly alien. 'He's just-'

'Michael knows who he is,' Mama cuts in flatly, and raises an eyebrow. 'It took him long enough. You still got some work to do.'

Connie makes an angry incredulous noise. 'You think Kay's gonna stay with him when she finds out?'

She hears Tom calling her name at the bottom of the stairs. Mama crosses past her to lay Mike back in the crib, somehow calmed out of his afternoon tantrum, and turns back as Connie pushes for the door.

'Constanzia.' Connie glances back; she looks small in the middle of the little faded bedroom, tired, suddenly, as the rest of them. 'I only got the three of you, now. We been through worse.'

Because we come out with our name, Connie thinks, light-headed as she takes a few steps and sees Tom looking up expectant with – bizarre – a picnic basket over one arm. Tom who hasn't even got their name and wishes he did. 'You coming?' he asks.

I'm going, she wants to say, but her throat feels as swollen as it did at the table and so she nods and descends. The silhouette at the end of the hall tugs at her eye past the banister: her brother is looking back over his shoulder after her footsteps either out of instinct or his own intention, eyes dark in the drawn-blinds afternoon shadow of the kitchen and the phone pressed to his ear.


	2. Chapter 2

The Rockies eat up so much of the sky that even airplanes notice, a whole peak’s worth above the jagged teeth of Colorado. The jet they take is new, a thousand years and several shades of steam-cleaned carpet smell from the Dakota in which he once learned how to use a parachute, but she rattles and staggers all the same with the pressure roaring up miles and miles. By the time Michael steps onto the tarmac in a rush of night-time desert heat, the pit of his stomach feels strangely disconnected from the rest of him and lingers as a dull altitude ache through the limo ride and the blast of Vegas.

Tom notices the way he’s thumbing his nose before they reach the city limits. It’s a habit from Sicily he’s mostly broken over the past few months – Pop’s advice – but it drifts up now at such particular moments that it’s the sort of tell a good _consigliere_ notices. He accepts the quiet-handed aspirin and swallows it dry, breathing slow through his nose as they roll past the first familiar name up in neon. Rocco, sat beside Tom facing backwards with a glass of water between his big knees, keeps his deep-set eyes steady at the window.

‘Shall we go over names again?’ Tom prompts gently. This is a variation on a trick from childhood – something they used to do when they took the train to New Orleans in the summer and the rocking made one of them sick – and fits oddly on him now with his black suit and his tight starch collar against the dark limo leather, family professional. Michael uncrosses his legs and nods, shifting in his seat to avoid the growing yellow glare rippling past his window.

‘Jimmy D’Angelo.’

‘Moe Green’s old head bookie. Fredo got him onside.’

Tom nods. ‘Henry Markowitz.’

‘He runs the Palazzo.’

‘And the Royale.’

‘And the Royale,’ Michael repeats dutifully. ‘Maybe the hotels too, if he agrees to release Johnny’s contract to us.’

‘He will,’ Tom says mildly, tipping his head back against the seat and pushing his straw hair back. ‘That’s not even business. He knows it’s just the polite thing to do – I’ve met him, I told you. Jake Lamora?’

‘Las Vegas police commissioner.’

‘Right. He’s Moe’s old boy.’

Michael hasn’t met him, but recalls his face from the neat manila files Tom keeps like a military secretary: dog-balding, scowling but not stupid, square lines gone jowly. This is one of the things he’s been better at teaching himself how to do, to the point he suspects it comes from old subconscious habits; it’s no surprise he’s far better at it with men than women, he supposes wryly.

They go through the other ten people who will be present at tomorrow night's meeting – seven casino owners or prominent floor-runners recommended by Fredo, a district attorney, and two bankers from Reno. Michael nudges Tom’s leg with his foot and asks suddenly for the names of their lawyers; when he reels them off quick and solemn-faced Michael snorts at him. Rocco actually turns his head and Tom gives a tight smile back, and he nods to acknowledge this tiny misjudgement. It’s not important but they are here, now, the Strip spilling through and making the tinted windows buzz, the casinos whose names they’ve memorised alongside their list of people sliding loud by over the heaving living pavement, and the importance of having one’s face on, Michael understands, is an instinct Tom has had more time to appreciate.

There is so much getting used to things. Most of it comes natural, but he has to remind himself: he is still new to this. Don’t slip, Michele. Not even with family.

Fredo is waiting for them at the casino doors wearing the loudest purple suit Michael’s ever seen and a shit-eating grin, all balance and confidence with none of the usual nerves jumping in the narrow angles of his face as they step from the limo into the lights. He grabs Michael tight and rocks them on the balls of his feet, nearly overbalancing them both as he kisses him on both cheeks.

‘Aw, Mikey – you looking great! You know that? You’re really something, hey!’ His older brother grips him by the arms to peer down his long nose at him properly, darting over the new-tailored grey suit that really fits him this year, his hair grown longer and slicked back Italian-style, his five thousand dollar cufflinks, and then quick and giddy flashing his teeth to Tom over Michael’s shoulder: ‘When’d you make my little brother a don, huh? He looks like he’s gonna ruin my life!’

Rocco slips past them to stand by the door and Fredo follows him with his eyes, bending his head conspiratorially to Michael and jerking his chin after him. ‘Where’d you find Luca Brasi’s ugly stepchild?’

Michael makes his smile small for the eyes-front doormen and the passing casino-goers and touches his brother’s elbow to turn them inside. ‘You gonna invite me into this nice place of yours?’

The regime change is obvious in the showy, easy lope in his brother’s walk through the lobby and the accumulation of smaller details: the wary flick of dealers’ eyes as they pass through the singing brilliant roar of the casino floor, the knowing smiles of cocktail waitresses sliding from him to Fredo, the turn of hopeful heads who recognise Fredo and pause at the people with him. They’re treating him like a Corleone, Michael notes, or at least that’s how Pop would see it – he’d be full of approval at his middle son without his usual self-conscious slouch or an outsider higher-up to speak of in his chosen territory. But their name has a different kind of currency here from the one Pop recognised, and stretching his gait to keep up with Fredo’s bounce Michael can feel the tiniest buzz of his brother’s usual anxiety thrumming still close at his side. He’ll need the full report to understand where they stand here, now.

There’s no party this time. Rocco goes to clear their rooms and Fredo takes Michael and Tom up to an empty cocktail bar balcony on the twenty-fifth floor, the Vegas hotel version of a quiet backroom. Up this high, it’s possible to remember they’re in a desert; Michael lets Fredo pour him a glass of champagne from the bottle that’s been waiting on ice and leans against the railing with his face out for the wind, breathing in deep. His stomach has remembered where it lives and it’s briefly possible to focus on the maybe-probably where they move here in six months or a year. Maybe. Not the city. Kay can tolerate Manhattan but not this, and Sicily made him realise he’s got a weird compulsion, inherited or otherwise, for keeping close to water. They have these lakes in the West, Fredo told him last time – chattered on and on about how they’ve got these big manmade things near Vegas that are practically their own reservoirs, coveted so highly even the Congressmen can’t always snap them up first without looking like they’re doing something vaguely criminal.

He and Tom take their champagne glasses and follow Fredo’s toast to the Wild West. He smiles wide between the two of them over his glass and rocks on his feet again. ‘You two look so East Coast,’ he remarks.

And they do – no one wears dark suits in Vegas in the summer. Tom, Michael knows, matched him intentionally, and won’t take his jacket off until he does.

‘Connie and Mama send their love,’ Tom offers.

‘How’s Connie doing, huh?’ Fredo glances between the two of them; there’s the familiar uncertainty. ‘I heard about Carlo. Did we-?’

‘Not right now,’ Michael says, a little sharper than he should. Fredo will guess and probably have Tom confirm it but the recurring image of their sister in his study comes up so fast and vivid it gives him a raw little shiver of something unspecific and he’s irritated, suddenly. ‘What's the matter?'

‘Eh?’

‘Fredo. Come on. We haven't had dinner yet and I'm not on vacation.'

His brother hesitates. Tom clears his throat and swills his champagne, looking meaningfully down at his feet.

‘I’m sorry, Mike – I tried to call you before you left, but-’

‘Is Johnny not coming?’

‘He’s here, he’ll be there tomorrow,’ Fredo clarifies, head bobbing. ‘It was just – this last minute thing’s come up and we’re not really prepared for it, it’s nothing I coulda done – ah, shit. I feel like I shoulda talked this over with Tom first, you know, I just…’

‘Well, he’s right here.’ Michael leans back against the balcony and lets his lower lip slide short through his teeth. Wind catches his jacket into a billow and he tugs it compulsively flat against his side again, stops his hand against his thigh.

Fredo hunches his shoulders and scratches his elbow, half-glancing at Tom without meeting his eyes. ‘We got some asshole hijacking the meeting,’ he mutters. ‘Some Federal-Bureau-of-Investigation-shaped asshole. I can’t get around it.’

Tom makes an incredulous noise. Michael pauses, thumb slipping from the cold side of his glass.

‘The FBI,’ he clarifies, quiet.

‘They got no right,’ Tom snarls quick, setting his glass down so hard it clicks angrily against the stone ledge and rounding on Fredo. ‘It’s a completely legitimate business meeting, completely, completely legal – you tell them that? Why didn’t you call me?’

‘I tried! You were already-’

‘They have a warrant? What the fuck!’

‘No, it was just-’

‘Mike – you’re not going anywhere near this thing, okay? Jesus Christ, Fredo-’

‘Okay, okay, Jesus!’ Fredo holds up his hands. ‘Look, it’s not a _raid_ , I’m not a fucking idiot – it’s one guy. One agent, I got his name and people running checks. We're pretty sure he’s not coming at us like that, and we'll know better by tomorrow.'

‘How do you _know?_ ’ Michael asks, and reminds himself to fucking breathe at the caught unnatural sound of his own voice. He has exactly no business being jumpy over feds, after what’s come and gone last month.

Fredo looks at him; Tom’s still standing close and furious enough to grab and shake him by the scruff, if that was still allowed even amongst themselves. ‘He said,’ he says slowly, treading careful, ‘they’re looking into East Coast and Chicago criminal buy-ups in the casino industry and he – wants to use the _opportunity_ , he said, of having us all in one place to discuss it. All the _legitimate_ big Vegas business owners.’

‘You’re not going,’ Tom says instantly.

Michael wrinkles his nose at this too-strong proclamation and runs his tongue slow over his teeth, considering. ‘So I get back on my plane like a legitimate business owner, huh? Back to my legitimate East Coast business and my legitimate family name?’

Suddenly it’s Tom who’s hesitating, though he’s gone flushed despite the heat rising up from the baked sidewalks below.

‘Mike – I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to have direct contact with the FBI,’ he says slowly, his voice lowering so sudden and private Fredo blinks like he’s been pushed back a step. ‘Even over something like this. I wouldn’t advise it. If – look, I don’t-’ He pauses and tries again, rubbing hard at his temple with the heel of his hand. ‘I don’t know what you discussed with Pop, but I know what we talked about. It’s one thing to keep from the Families and another from the goddamn feds.’

They’ve talked about it once, just after Pop died and Tom resumed his place and duties as _consigliere_ with a sort of formal inaugural interrogation. It floats delicate and strange here, now: Tom steady-eyed but pale, now many conversations past that time in Pop’s office with Michael sat awkward behind the desk for the first time and both of them looking and looking at each other, helpless between the phrases they’d learned by heart. Fredo sits abruptly on the edge of a deck chair with realising and Michael feels his chest tighten involuntarily. Tom, he forgets as often as the pace of business will let him, knows more than anyone except Kay.

‘This is about you,’ Tom continues quietly, still holding his gaze. ‘They know everyone in this town already – fine, Moe Green goes, they figure they got a handle on it. They’re coming to get a look at _you_ , coming into unfamiliar territory. I don’t want you walking into the same room as an FBI agent for as long as we can help it – I don’t want them to have an excuse to dig any further than they already have. Especially when we’re leaving New York as hot as it is right now.’

‘It isn’t,’ Michael says quietly. His fingertips have gone numb against the champagne glass. ‘Not anymore.’

Tom presses his lips together and stares. ‘As it was up ‘til recently, then. As we made it.’

‘Mike’s right,’ Fredo pitches in softly, pushing a hand absent and anxious through his dark hair. ‘He can’t get back on the plane tonight. It looks like he’s got something to hide. That’s gotta be worse. And it’s legal-’

Tom snorts, impatient. ‘I don’t want-’

‘Okay, _consigliere_ ,’ Michael cuts him off, and this time his voice sounds like it should to himself. There is safety in the formality that used to sound strange with Tom; he allows himself to lean on the language Pop would use harder than he usually would. ‘I know what you want; I’ve heard your advice and I appreciate it. I agree with my brother.’

He watches Tom register the word, and lets it be the thing that sits between them instead.

* * *

A day and a night in a casino is like spending time on the moon. Michael prefers not to gamble but stays reading inside, blinds drawn, sees Fredo for a drink in the afternoon and lets the night come slowly. He has dinner in Tom's room and takes his time in the toilet before they go, looking in the mirror and reassure himself he's on the ground: suit buttoned, hair back, face on. 

In his adult years before the family business, even the littlest public speaking occasions — the backs of coffee shops, Hanover town hall meetings, officer training — used to make him downright shy. It came from his half-unnatural habit of never speaking up in class: he’d know the answer but hate how his voice drew stares to his corner of the lecture hall. Now he falls into a rhythm sideways, letting the beginnings of a monologue percolate slow and deliberate in his head while someone else speaks and finally choosing an excerpt that sits square on his tongue. He used to think aloud more, but Kay and Tom are working at that from different angles, each with their own purpose and both, he recognises, to his advantage.

His father’s godson on his left side lending the easy weight of his Hollywood face, carefully polite and formal here with Michael; Fredo on his right as his Vegas guarantor; Tom sat just behind with the lawyers and yes-men; Rocco ten steps back and right, impassive. Here is the Vegas police commissioner out of uniform, his face just as sour. Here is the owner of the casino he’ll buy. All these men and him sat in the middle of the table, quiet and deliberately East Coast, and the sound of chairs creaking and professional laughter bubbling over clinked glasses scrapes neatly clean away a past where he was anything but born to this kind of room.

Michael crosses his ankles under the table and leans back a little in his chair, doing a quick sweep of the room for the faces in Tom’s file while keeping his own impassive. It’s all right for him not to do the small talk circuit, he figures — no point pretending he knows any of them as well as they know each other, and the three or four he needs, he’ll make better use of his time seeing one-on-one. Fredo’s doing half the work for him anyway, flicking eyebrows and quick smiles at anyone who lingers on him. Most of their eyes pass over him on the way to Johnny Fontane, but Michael notices the ones who pause to size him up, who don’t look away when he looks back.

People begin to clear the skyline outside the boardroom window and take their seats. Fredo tips his head and whispers: ‘Don’t tell Tom if you wanna win that argument, but – I don’t see the fed.’

Michael lifts a shoulder halfway, keeping his eyes on the table. ‘Who else knows he's supposed to be coming?'

‘My floor guys. No one else, unless he talked to the rest of them.'

‘That’s fine, then.’

‘Mike-’

‘It’s fine. I’m not worried.’

‘Do you think we should wait-?’

Michael turns his head to stare and Fredo grumbles okay-okay-okays into his drink. As if cued, the door at the far end of the boardroom swings open and a man who is not obviously FBI — Vegas suit, grey hair slicked back — strides through alone and with such easy authority that Michael instantly knows he cannot be anyone else, even without his brother stiffening in the seat beside him like one of the nervous tell-faced tourists at his tables downstairs.

Henry Markowitz, who is wearing the most expensive suit in the room, follows him instantly with his eyes, as do his two men seated in the equivalent of Tom’s place. ‘Who’s this prick?’ he booms, directing this to no one in particular but gesturing towards Michael’s end of the room.

It’s his meeting – his responsibility. The fed is already pulling up a chair and shooting him a cordial look, actually nodding to Fredo; Michael can feel Tom’s anxiety palpable just behind.

He keeps his seat and his slight lean back in the chair, along with the room’s attention. ‘This gentlemen from the Bureau’s kindly agreed to sit in and advise on a few matters,’ he says, generous and calm. A murmur goes up but this is the best he can do. Better it looks as though this is his idea, even a potential collaboration or buy-out, than appear anything less than the New York don they read about in the papers last month.

Business will be trickier, but the table will behave themselves. Michael lets them look between him and the fed, who’s folded his hands on the table and is watching him too. Michael keeps his eyes careful and steady on Markowitz and the other casino owners.

‘I want to thank you for having us.’

Markowitz snorts. ‘Not that we had much of a choice, when-’ And there – a ducked chin towards the fed ‘-with Moe gone so suddenly. He left a real gap in the market.’

‘Moe Green’s revenue wasn’t as good as he made it out to be,’ Michael points out lightly, sliding his palm on the lacquer tabletop. ‘But you’re not wrong – you’d know more than me, and I imagine we’ll keep it that way. I came here hoping to discuss some very specific investments that will cause as little disruption as possible to the casino business.’

‘You’ll forgive us, D- Mr Corleone,’ cuts in a white-haired Italian man at the end of the table who censors himself halfway with more elegance than Markowitz, easily discarding Michael’s other title with a practiced wave of his ringed hand. Michael searches for the name, remembers only Chicago – the fed is still looking at him, his gaze blocking out the final few lines on Tom’s list – and raises his eyebrows politely with his mind still curiously blank. ‘Your family looking West is like manifest destiny, no? The natives have good reason to be suspicious, when you feel the need to guarantee us you won’t be disrupting.’

Michael smiles: this, he understands. ‘You’re thinking of the previous generation. My lawyer has copies of proposals we’ve pre-circulated, if you want to check the details over again. I have no interest in competing with your existing interests here, only adding our business to your experience. We’re only New Yorkers,’ he adds, tilting his head just enough to disarm. ‘We’re here to learn from the West as far as the entertainment industry goes.’

His acting has never been instinctive but Johnny, who understands show business, takes his cue and gives them the pitch in the put-on California drawl they know from the movies.

Everyone seems to like the sound of five shows a year. No one, to Michael’s slight surprise, bats an eye at Fredo, who apparently dresses enough like a Vegas man to have gained the illusion of reliability, continuing to run the casino they shot out from under Moe Green. They predictably get grouchy when the talk turns to specific numbers, but after about half an hour of arguing details and Tom pushing pieces of paper wordlessly over his shoulder the room falls quiet and strangely compliant. Henry Markowitz gone halves on the Palazzo, the hotels traded for Johnny’s contract, salaries settled, agreed dates for signing contracts and, it’s naturally implied, the smaller details they cannot discuss with the FBI in the room. This is not exactly the Vegas he’s been led to imagine, or indeed that existed even last month when Moe was still running half the city. Michael presses his fingertips lightly to the edge of the table and realises he’s been holding his breath through the last exchanges. The old Chicago don across the table gives him the small slow old-guard smile Clemenza keeps for other Italians at a wider table. All right.

In the quiet, eyes around the conference table have gone to the fed, who’s sitting peacefully enough at the end with his hands folded still. He hauls himself to his feet and Michael allows himself a full critical look at him: nearly twice his own age but sort of one-time John Wayne good-looking, with a twice-broken nose and a square Protestant jaw and a lazy slide to how he glances around the room.

‘Nothing new from me!’ he announces, and gets a few blinks from the second row at his high-pitched nasal Harvard blast in contrast with his last-decade Western tie.

‘George Macon, for anyone I haven’t met-’ He tips his head graciously towards the New York end. ‘The Bureau sent me as a courtesy call. Nothing we wouldn’t do for the VA and the Lady’s Auxiliary meetings next Tuesday. Jake here can tell you more about this little investigation we’re putting together, for all interested parties – unlike Mr Corleone, I didn’t think to bring hand-outs. Smart!’

His laugh blares staccato and too loud. Beside Markowitz, the dog-faced police commissioner gives a wet, uncomfortable click of his tongue and wrinkles his nose. He’s here first on a Corleone invitation and the fed clearly knows it, but another beat passes and this appears to be a dismissal rather than a prompt. Chairs scrape awkwardly and murmurs spring back up into a little hubbub as the fed turns and goes as casual and abrupt as he came.

Fredo snorts his disbelief. ‘ _Interested parties_ – you gotta be shitting me. Who the fuck-?'

‘Shut up,’ Michael murmurs, and turns to shake Johnny’s hand before rising to greet the room properly.Everyone, the police commissioner included, is now in a hurry to call him _Don_.

* * *

It’s late, well after he’s gotten off the phone with Kay and the East Coast gone to sleep, that Tom knocks in his pyjamas with his file in his hands.

Michael flicks on the light at the wall and opens the door reluctantly; he’s still private and therefore irritable after he’s changed his clothes, though it’s been years since there was anything out of the ordinary to see.

‘Mike – sorry.’

‘I wasn’t asleep – come on.’

Tom pushes his hair out of his eyes, still bleary from the party, and follows him to the bed. Michael pats for him to sit and he doesn’t.

‘The fed.’

He nods, pulling the silk casino dressing gown tighter at the neck and pushing his back against the headboard. ‘Fredo’s check came through?’

‘Mine did.’ He hesitates and sits formal and awkward on the edge of the bed, the file held close against his chest. ‘George Macon’s not his real name.’

‘That’s very Hollywood for the FBI.’ Michael yawns. ‘Did you ever think about what your name would be, if you went undercover?'

‘Mikey-’

‘Okay.’

Tom takes a breath and lets him look at the right page. Lawrence Sangster, very fucking Harvard. Michael scans without much interest until he sees _Buffalo_ and _Manhattan_ , and the older photograph and newspaper cutting clipped to the bottom left-hand corner as goes Tom’s particular neat filing pattern. The fed is wearing a police uniform and the names of the bars in the paper headline stand out in stark black ink and Michael feels, suddenly, the press of days-ago altitude in his gut, the clawing back of unnatural sensation so fast he loses all the air in his lungs.

‘The dates,’ his brother prompts, gentle. ‘Is he-?’

Michael cannot breathe.

Tom casts his eyes down at the file between them, hunch-shouldered and quiet in his striped pyjamas. ‘I was going to ask Kay,’ he says softly. ‘Just this once.’

‘I’d kill you,’ Michael hisses, terrible and giddy, and slides off the bed to be sick.


End file.
